When I researched the comercial edition of the Jumanji board game it brought up that first childhood disapointment. A boardgame that fails to capture any 'movie magic' at all. What is missing? I came to the conclusion that it is what the movie shows us, that the story tells. It's missing a story. Without such an engageing topic a boardgame falls flat as a race game or a chess game with little to keep wee ones interested. So I came up with my idea of how to redesign jumanji to 'capture' the movie magic. "tales of the arabian knights' by Zman games was my inspiration. Implement a Cyoa style book element into the game. This way the funky decoder and annoying dice can be abandoned in liu of a good well constructed (though segmented) story for the players. I like how "tales" acomplished this. Each turn your asked two questions. One is a riddle and one is a morality question each with multiple answers determined by your decision and what player character you used. It would be like combineing 'trivial pursuit' - 'would you rather' and character elements of an rpg. The results would be amazing. It would turn a simple race game into an adventure. That is how i would bring movie magic into a boring board game.
Jumanji: Bring back the movie Magic.
- BigOleBob's blog
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No dice?
Jumanji with no dice is like cereal without milk. The entire point of the movie is that it is so dangerous to roll those dice, that it is better to not play the game at all... To really capture the spirit of the movie you have to put players in hard-to-survive situations that demand them taking chances to succeed. Perhaps give each player some points of luck, and in the case of a failure to succeed in a situation, they get to lower those points. The one with the most remaining luck-points at the end of the game is the winner. Or do something else. But you can't take away the dice from this particular game.
The forgotten fact:
Sorry It was not my intent to imply that the dice would not be used at all. They would be used.
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My original funky idea is that there are 4 story paths. One for each token.
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Then each turn you roll the dice. This works on a non acumulative base 6 system resulting in 36 results so 2-3 is 23. It would equate a regular result of 9 if a normal base 10 system since there is no zero. But the player doesnt need to know that.
All they need know is that one of the two dice is the First dice. Or just use two color dice.
1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 1-6, 2-1, 2-2, 2-3, etc
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Once you get your result you look up the same numbered passage in the 'Explorers journal' under your token. This in turn gives a variety of answers that lead to the second set of questioning and then that results in the final numerical result of how far your token moves.
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It's still a race game but what a mind trip it is to get there.